Search Results for: women-behind-bars

More and more women—mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—are doing hard prison time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars. Oddly, there’s been little public discussion about the dramatic increase of women in the prison system. What exactly is happening here, and why? The answers are in Women Behind Bars, in which investigative journalist Silja Talvi sheds light on why American girls and women are being locked up at such unprecedented rates. Talvi travels across the country to weave together interviews with inmates, correctional officers, and administrators, providing readers with a glance at the impact incarceration has on our society. With a combination of compassion and critical analysis, Talvi delivers a timely, in-depth analysis of a growing and extremely complicated issue.

From their illicit love affairs to race relations, prostitution, protection rackets, and drug smuggling, this shocking account reveals the true story of America's most dangerous and imprisoned female criminals. Originally published as Caged Heat. Reissue.

Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation’s jails every year. What happens to them as they carry their pregnancies in a space of punishment? In this time when the public safety net is frayed, incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor. Using her ethnographic fieldwork and clinical work as an ob-gyn in a women’s jail, Carolyn Sufrin explores how jail has, paradoxically, become a place where women can find care. Focusing on the experiences of incarcerated pregnant women as well as on the practices of the jail guards and health providers who care for them, Jailcare describes the contradictory ways that care and maternal identity emerge within a punitive space presumed to be devoid of care. Sufrin argues that jail is not simply a disciplinary institution that serves to punish. Rather, when understood in the context of the poverty, addiction, violence, and racial oppression that characterize these women’s lives and their reproduction, jail can become a safety net for women on the margins of society.

Genre: Comedy Characters: 10f, 1m (to play several roles) Scenery: Unit set In this hilarious satire on B-movies of the 1950's, Mary Eleanor, an innocent duped into crime, lands in the Greenwich Village Woman's House of Detention, presided over by a massive matron with a taste for sadism and female flesh as our heroine, now Caged in the Big House, learns about life The Hard Way... "Sex is rampant and comically cheerful!...A delirious evening of Grade-A tomfoolery!"- The New York Times "Hysterically, paradoxically, fascinatingly, diabolically funny!"- New York Daily News

?The integration of race into the discussion of women and corrections is important, particularly in the classroom. This book, unlike most, does not address the issue of race as an afterthought, but instead shows its relevance by integrating it throughout.? ?Stephanie Bush-Baskette, Rutgers University?This comprehensive text is a strong contribution to the study of women and incarceration. Particularly effective in terms of its focus on race, gender, and imprisonment, it should be required reading in a wide range of courses.? ?Barbara Bloom, Sonoma State UniversityToday?s prisons are increasingly filled with poor, dark-skinned, single mothers locked up for low-level drug involvement?with serious ramifications for the corrections system. Women Behind Bars offers the first comprehensive exploration of the challenges faced by incarcerated women in the United States.Young and Reviere show conclusively that serving time in prisons designed by and for men not only does little to address what landed women, particularly women of color, there in the first place, but also undermines their prospects for an improved life on the outside. Using a multifaceted race/class/gender lens, the authors make a convincing argument that women in prison are punished twice: first by their sentences, and again because the policies that govern time behind bars were not designed to address women?s unique problems and responsibilities.Vernetta D. Young is associate professor of sociology at Howard University. She is coeditor of African American Classics in Criminology and Criminal Justice. Rebecca Reviere is associate professor of sociology at Howard University. Contents: Equal Rights or Lost Opportunities? Women in the Prison System. A Brief History of Women in Prison. The Changing Face of Female Prisoners. Women Prisoners: Special Issues. Drug Use and Drug Treatment. Mental and Physical Health Care. Women and Children First. Death and Dying. We Want You Back: The Return to Society. Conclusion. Still More Problems Than Solutions.

“Life in a women’s prison is full of surprises,” writes Cristina Rathbone in her landmark account of life at MCI-Framingham. And so it is. After two intense court battles with prison officials, Rathbone gained unprecedented access to the otherwise invisible women of the oldest running women’s prison in America. The picture that emerges is both astounding and enraging. Women reveal the agonies of separation from family, and the prevalence of depression, and of sexual predation, and institutional malaise behind bars. But they also share their more personal hopes and concerns. There is horror in prison for sure, but Rathbone insists there is also humor and romance and downright bloody-mindedness. Getting beyond the political to the personal, A World Apart is both a triumph of empathy and a searing indictment of a system that has overlooked the plight of women in prison for far too long. At the center of the book is Denise, a mother serving five years for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense. Denise’s son is nine and obsessed with Beanie Babies when she first arrives in prison. He is fourteen and in prison himself by the time she is finally released. As Denise struggles to reconcile life in prison with the realities of her son’s excessive freedom on the outside, we meet women like Julie, who gets through her time by distracting herself with flirtatious, often salacious relationships with male correctional officers; Louise, who keeps herself going by selling makeup and personalized food packages on the prison black market; Chris, whose mental illness leads her to kill herself in prison; and Susan, who, after thirteen years of intermittent incarceration, has come to think of MCI-Framingham as home. Fearlessly truthful and revelatory, A World Apart is a major work of investigative journalism and social justice. From the Hardcover edition.

Resistance Behind Bars is an important and uplifting call to end prisons as they currently are, supported by stories of struggles and uprisings in women's prisons over the years. While many have heard of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, the 1974 August Rebellion remains relatively unknown even in activist circles. Resistance Behind Bars is determined to challenge and change such oversights. As it examines daily struggles against appalling prison conditions and injustices, the book details collective organising and individual resistance among incarcerated women

A judge hands down a stretch in a local, state, or federal prison. It's time for some serious life lessons. With the crime rates soaring in the United States and the prison population growing faster than at any other time in American history, staying alive and well - both mentally and physically - is tougher than ever.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL “Gritty, empathetic, finely rendered, no sugary toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled.” —Margaret Atwood via Twitter “A page turner… one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart.” —The New York Times Book Review (cover review) “Brilliant and devastating… a heartbreaking, true, and nearly flawless novel.” —NPR “With her richly textured third novel, Kushner certifies her place as one of the great American novelists of the 21st century.” —Entertainment Weekly From twice National Book Award–nominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called “the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year” (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner’s work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction “succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.”

In this study of women who marry convicted criminals, eight couples talk about themselves, telling how their relationships started and developed into intimacy, details of their marriages, and the eventual fate of the marriages. The author is a journalist who writes investigative articles for the Adelaide Review'.

The Netflix series Orange is the New Black has drawn widespread attention to many of the dysfunctions of prisons and the impact prisons have on those who live and work behind the prison gates. This anthology deepens this public awareness through scholarship on the television program and by exploring the real-world social, psychological, and legal issues female prisoners face. Each chapter references a particular connection to the Netflix series as its starting point of analysis. The book brings together scholars to consider both media representations as well as the social justice issues for female inmates alluded to in the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. The chapters address myriad issues including cultural representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality; social justice issues for transgender inmates; racial dynamics within female prisons; gender and female prison structures/policies; treatment of women in prison; re-incarcerated and previously incarcerated women; self and identity; gender, race, and sentencing; and reproduction and parenting for female inmates.

Stories Behind Bars was inspired by the author's job as a Spanish interpreter in the US courts. It consists of four individually bound silkscreen printed booklets: in one, a young man is deported using video teleconferencing, another gives some brief history of immigration detention, and all tell stories of immigrants in U.S. prisons and jails. The stories give the reader an insight into the complex issues surrounding the immigration debate. The four separate pamphlets are housed in a slipcase with a barred window. Silkscreen printed.

This unique book provides a rare insight into the debilitating impact of regimes that fail to respond to the complex and gender specific needs of women behind bars. Exploring the marginalization, mental health and experiences of women in prison, it specifically focuses on the legacy of women's imprisonment in Northern Ireland.

A Lower East Side woman bartender recounts how her temporary withdrawl from corporate America turned into a ten-year position at Marion's Continental Restaurant and Lounge, during which she learned insider secrets and encountered a host of celebrities. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

An urgent exposé of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.

Prison Movies: Cinema Behind Bars traces the public fascination with incarceration from the silent era to the present. Often considered an offshoot of the gangster film, the prison film precedes the gangster film and is in many ways its opposite. Rather than focusing on tragic figures heading for a fall, the prison film focuses on fallen characters seeking redemption. The gangster's perverse pursuit of the American dream is irrelevant to the prisoner for whom that dream has already failed. At their core, prison films are about self-preservation at the hands of oppressive authority. Like history itself, prison films display long stretches of idleness punctuated by eruptions of violence, dangerous moments that signify liberation and the potential for change. The enclosed world of the prison is a highly effective microcosm, one that forces characters and audiences alike to confront vexing issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. These portrayals of men and women behind bars have thrived because they deal with such fundamental human themes as freedom, individuality, power, justice, and mercy. Films examined include The Big House (1930), I Want to Live! (1958), The Defiant Ones (1958), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Midnight Express (1978), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Starred Up (2013).

A deeply personal and inspiring memoir recounting one woman’s struggles—beginning with her birth in prison—to find self-acceptance Prison Baby is a revised and substantially expanded version of Deborah Jiang Stein’s self-published memoir, Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus. Even at twelve years old, Deborah, the adopted daughter of a progressive Jewish couple in Seattle, felt like an outsider. Her mixed Asian features set her apart from her white, well-intentioned parents who evaded questions about her past. But when she discovered a letter revealing the truth of her prison birth to a heroin-addicted mother—and that she spent the first year of life in prison—Deborah spiraled into emotional lockdown. For years she turned to drugs, violence, and crime as a way to cope with her grief. Ultimately, Deborah overcame the stigma, shame, and secrecy of her birth, and found peace by helping others—proving that redemption and acceptance are possible even from the darkest corners. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A deeply stirring account of one woman's experience teaching drama to women in prison. I began to understand that female prisoners are not "damaged goods" and to recognize that most of these women had toughed it out in a society that favors others-- by gender, class, or race. They are Desdemonas suffering because of jealous men, Lady Macbeths craving the power of their spouses, Portias disguised as men in order to get ahead, and Shylocks who, being betrayed, take the law into their own hands. So writes Jean Trounstine in Shakespeare Behind Bars. In this gripping account, Trounstine, who spent ten years teaching at Framingham Women's Prison in Massachusetts, focuses on six inmates who, each in her own way, discover in the power of great drama a way to transcend the painful constraints of incarceration. We meet: * Dolly, a fiftyish grandmother who brings her knitting to classes and starts a battered-women's group in prison *Bertie, a Jamaican beauty estranged from her homeland, torn with guilt, and shunned for her crime * Kit, a tough, wisecracking con who stirs up trouble whenever she can-- until she's threatened with losing her kids * Rose, an outsider in the prison community who lives with HIV and eventually gains acceptance through drama * Rhonda, a college-educated leader whose life falls apart when her father dies and who struggles in prison to reestablish her roots * Mamie, a nurse in the free world, now the prison gardener who makes cards with poetry and dried flowers and battles her own illness behind bars Shakespeare Behind Bars is a uniquely powerful work that gives voice to forgotten women, sheds a compassionate light on a dark world, and proves the redemptive power of art and education.

We are sacred. Everything on earth is sacred. This truth has been forgotten. Hunger and sorrow are visiting the earth because of this forgotten knowledge-it will only cease when we remember. The only lesson worthy of remembering is how to love and care for the earth. It is written on the hearts of the women of this planet. The earth mother is waiting for her daughters to bring balance, once more, to the physical world, and your feminine energy is needed. Women are the key that unlocks the door to the evolutionary leap that will dance and awaken the golden dream on earth.